Innovation 4 Everyone

This is the second year that we offer the FIRST Lego League Robotics after school academy. Last year, due to the competition dates that coincided with our holidays, we were not able to complete the program and take our kids to the competition. But this year promises to be different. The date for the competition does favor our school calendar and the team is working hard and has advanced throughout the semester. This is what's happened so far on Mondays after school: • Learning about the Into Orbit challenge, the FLL program, and the core values.   • Deciding on which challenge to work on. (Building houses in space) • All together the team builds the Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot.   • Practicing coding skills as they await for the mission models to arrive. • Mission models arrived! Time to build all of them.   • Setting up the challenge table. • Deciding on the team's official name. ("Techno") • Challenge table is ready! • Working on program

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the 37th Annual Educators' Conference that took place in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. This year's theme was "Transforming School from Within". It was great to meet new educators, old friends, and amazing presenters. I went to two sessions led by Jennifer Abrams, one called "Having Hard Conversations" and the other one called "Being More Influential, No Matter Your Role". I found that my learning in both sessions will impact my workplace. With a new twist in my role this year, now as an innovation coach, I found Jennifer's recommendations highly valuable and timely. My main takeaway comes from the second day keynote speaker, Myron Dueck. He spoke about 'Ask Them' - Why Listening to our Students Can Transform our Schools. It made me realize how teacher-centered we tend to be and forget how much insight we can gain if we just ask our students for input. You can find highlights

The purpose of integrating STEM play time into the preschool grades is to expose students as early as possible to STEM. The NGSS begins with Kinder, so we took the initiative to start with STEM early on. Additionally, a factor we identified was the need for more creative play time. These young students have a very structured day, hence why we promote more play time. Being able to address both needs resulted in the perfect match. Using a very, very basic engineering design model and design thinking structure, we expect students to develop skills that will allow them to explore real-world issues and problems, develop ideas and theories and pursue answers and solutions. Without ever naming or labeling the process, but rather, modeling a more natural approach to solving problems, students will have developed, tested and refined simple prototypes as part a basic design process. In all the experiences children are engaged in, they work collaboratively in small groups, and learn to t

  Last year we began an after school club called FIRST Lego League. We had kids 16 boys and girls sign up. The kids enjoyed the course. One key component of the program is the core values. These are: Discovery, Innovation, Impact, Inclusion, Teamwork, and Fun. In an effort to develop the core values, we took the kids to a day at an adventure challenge course. They absolutely enjoyed it! Due to a conflict between our holidays and the competition dates, our students were not able to participate at this time. But there was lots of learning and team building along the way. We hope that in the next installment of the FLL our teams will be able to show off their skills. You can read more about our experience of bringing FLL to our school in this magazine article. Cheers!

Hi! A few weeks ago I was faced with a challenge. I needed to add subtitles to a Youtube video. At first it seemed like an easy task and I'd be done in a short time. However, it turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated. I will describe the process I followed and hope that it can help others in a similar situation. Situation 1: I needed to add Spanish subtitles to a 45 min. long English video. Before working on the long video, I tested how to create the translated subtitles on a smaller one, and it worked! STEP 1: Obtain the transcript. In the editing mode, go to Subtitles/CC. You'll be prompted to select the language of the video. Once this is defined, you'll see a transcript of your video. At this point, you can download a file with the transcript. STEP 2: Translate the transcript For this I found an application called Subtitle Translation Wizard (in the Apple App Store). This application requieres an .srt file, so now I kn